Cloud Foundry Further Improves Support for Ruby Applications

We have recently made many improvements to Cloud Foundry to increase Ruby developer productivity and expand support for Ruby application frameworks. Cloud Foundry was built to run multiple languages and frameworks, and we have had support for Ruby from day one.

It is well known that VMware developers are the stewards of the incredibly popular Java Spring framework. Therefore, Cloud Foundry’s support for running Java applications in a platform as a service environment has always been excellent. However, many CloudFoundry.com users may not realize that most of Cloud Foundry’s system components are built using the Ruby programming language, and providing great support for Ruby applications is also very important to us.

In the past few months, we have been quietly adding features and improving support for running Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, Rack, and even JRuby applications on CloudFoundry.com. Jennifer Hickey, a developer on the Cloud Foundry team, recently hosted a webinar on deploying Ruby applications to Cloud Foundry and covered the following topics:

Rails 3.1 and 3.2 applications are now well-supported on CloudFoundry.com. The development team resolved a number of issues that had previously required workarounds.

JRuby applications can run on CloudFoundry.com with some simple tweaks. Look for a blog post soon that will document the steps to deploy a JRuby application to Cloud Foundry.

Auto-reconfiguration for Ruby are now supported for Rails and Sinatra applications using Cloud Foundry services. The auto-reconfiguration capability will automatically locate the initialization for Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Mongo, or RabbitMQ anywhere in your code and dynamically update them to the service(s) bound to your application. This allows you to simply deploy your Ruby applications to CloudFoundry.com without changing any code or configuration. We have fully detailed this feature and its technical details in a blog post: Part 1 – Auto-reconfiguration. We also give to the option of having more control and explicitly configure your application to run on Cloud Foundry. This is documented in another blog post: Part 2 – Run-time Support for Ruby Applications.

Rails console, a popular tool for Rails developers to interact with their Rails application, is now available through the VMC command line client. A blog post, Cloud Foundry Now Supports the Rails Console, was published to explain how to use this feature to connect to Rails applications. Using the Rails console, you can easily view and modify your data, inspect state, or interact with application methods. You can even run Rake tasks inside the Rails console to perform administrative tasks on your applications.

Rack applications, a modular Ruby web server interface, are now supported. Cloud Foundry’s VMC will automatically recognize a config.ru Rackup file and use it to run your web application. The auto-reconfiguration feature is also supported for rack applications.

If you develop Ruby applications, you will want to view Jennifer’s webinar recording and see how fast and easy it is to deploy Ruby applications on CloudFoundry.com.

We strive to provide the best PaaS support for running Ruby applications. If you have any feedback for us on how to improve Cloud Foundry’s Ruby support, we welcome you to drop us a note at our support site.